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Persepolis

Directed and written by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Starring the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux

Classification: 14A

Rating: ***1/2

Persepolis is as modern as tomorrow's headlines and as classic as an ancient myth. It takes two stories that are timeless – the impetuous youth struggling to come of age; the exile displaced by war from a beloved homeland – and weaves them into a single chronicle that is often poignant, sometimes funny and always bluntly honest. The place is Iran, from the late seventies through the nineties, but both the child and the tale could as easily hail from Sierra Leone (read Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone) or from Iraq (see the Baghdad Burning blog), or from those countless other battlegrounds, then and now, that permanently scar the innocent. That's precisely what gives this picture such resonance: By being so specific to one, it's relevant to all.

The one is Marjane Satrapi, who, in collaboration with co-director Vincent Paronnaud, has brought to the screen what she first created in her graphic novels, an autobiographical series drawn in basic black-and-white panels. The film animates those panels the old-fashioned way – no computers, just thousands of inked cells – and that nod to tradition neatly reinforces the ageless nature of the themes, reminding us that we've heard this story before and, sadly, will surely hear it again.

The start is in Tehran, 1978, where young Marjane (voiced by Gabrielle Lopes) lives with her middle-class family, watching through their apartment window as the revolution rumbles up the city streets. She's a willful, tempestuous, curious nine-year-old who, like all kids, drifts along the prevailing social currents, respecting the Shah one moment and excitedly shouting him down the next. Fortunately, her parents (Catherine Deneuve and Simon Abkarian) take pains to lend her, and us, some historical perspective. What's more, her uncle Anouche, an unapologetic democrat, offers a bruised example of politics' recurring tides. A frequent guest of the state, he was jailed and beaten first by the Shah's CIA-trained henchmen, and again by the equally ardent fundamentalists who succeeded them. So, in the back alleys with her little friends, Marjane gleefully plays the local version of cowboys and Indians – I'll be the torturer, you be the tortured.

Then Iraq invades, civil war making way for a common enemy, and the scene skips ahead to 1982, when our girl (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni now) is attending a stricter school and wearing the mandated head scarf. But the head it hides is filled with a teenager's rebellious urges. Beneath her black robe, she proudly sports a punk T-shirt; on the black market, she furtively buys an Iron Maiden tape. Around her, other teenagers, once relegated to the servant classes, have risen to literally take up arms. In the uniform of the fashion police, they brandish their guns, pointing them at women whose scarves have slipped by a shameless inch, or at anyone who dares to keep company with the demon booze. Pushed and pulled by such conflicting forces, Marjane often seeks refuge in the care of her granny (the wonderful Danielle Darrieux), a crusty old secularist who stuffs her bra with sweet-smelling jasmine and her granddaughter with a brand of wisdom that transcends politics: “Keep your dignity and be true to yourself. You always have a choice.”

In her first period of exile, sent by her worried parents to a school in Vienna, Marjane sniffs the liberated air and makes an obvious choice – sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll. But, like many expatriates, she falls into a trap that runs on alternating current, that leaves her simultaneously drawn to and estranged from her adopted culture. Ultimately, dignity suffers, guilt deepens and depression looms. However, a return to Tehran in 1992 only doubles her sense of exile, encasing her in a cruel limbo, a relative stranger now even in her homeland. From that isolated perspective, Marjane is able to see what her family has blinded themselves to: “We were so eager for happiness that we forgot we weren't free.” That's an astute observation, and, I suspect, true of many people sentenced to live out their quotidian lives under a repressive regime.

But – and this is what makes her portrait so honest – Marjane is not above moral reproach. She too can be shrewd and manipulative, at one point saving herself by deflecting the attention of those theocratic cops toward an innocent man, carted off to pay a severe price. Granny reprimands her, but it's her mother who faces the hard facts and, out of love, exiles her daughter a second time: “Today's Iran is not for you.”

Today's Paris, where she works and still lives, has proven more accommodating. Indeed, the entire film unfolds as an extended flashback, framed by a shot of the current Marjane loitering at Orly airport. Everything in between is wholly in black and white, and at times the lines can seem a little too crudely drawn, without the shading needed to distinguish the supporting characters. (Or maybe that's deliberate – memory has a way of blurring differences.) But here, at the airport, there's a flash of colour, the red of passion, as the exile approaches the boarding gate for the evening flight to Tehran. Of course, she has no ticket, no itinerary, no direction home. Instead, in the night sky, the departing plane soars overhead, while far below in a Parisian cab, the scarred child retreats back into the thriving adult. They are, after all, life-long companions.

Persepolis opens in Vancouver and Toronto Friday, with other release dates to be announced.

From storyboard to screen

Graphic novels have provided the material for plenty of films this decade, for better and for worse.

Ghost World (2001)

An appropriately meandering

adaptation of Daniel Clowes's graphic novel that brings to life two teenaged girls (Scarlett

Johansson and Thora Birch) struggling with boredom,

men and growing up.

American Splendor (2003)

Misfit file clerk and writer

Harvey Pekar sees his life story transformed yet again, from

a series of comics and graphic novels into an imaginative film that blurs life and animation, fantasy and reality.

Sin City (2005)

Director Robert Rodriguez

turns three noirish stories by Frank Miller into a wild,

visually inventive ride.

V for Vendetta (2006)

The Wachowski brothers

bring this eighties dystopia from Thatcher's England into the post-Sept. 11 era, but the script and

direction are more cartoonish than sobering.

300 (2007)

Another Frank Miller adaptation gets bloodied by dull direction and plenty of fake gore.

Like a comic book, and not

in a good way.

Alex Bozikovic